Identity in AR and VR

Jeremy
Bailenson
(Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab):
My job at Stanford is to run experiments, understand how the mind
works when people encounter agents and avatars and other scenes in
Virtual Reality. To figure out how can social communication and
virtual reality solve some pretty hard problems. We've studied the
way people interact with other people represented by avatars and the
neat thing about social VR, people are the content. You just let him
talk.

David
Oh
(Head of Developer Relations at Meta): In this near future
that we're building virtual characters and virtual avatar will be
part of our everyday life. Avatars are going to even become a second
identity for us. These ideas of identity and who we are as
individuals it really just matters in here and throughout augmented
reality will be able to change those realities for the
better.

Philip Rosedale (Founder of Second Life /
CO_Founder High Fidelity): The game here is for each of us to be
unique to be interesting. People often say that our real-world
identities are somehow more real than our chosen identities in
virtual worlds but I actually think the opposite is true. In the same
way that we project ourselves into our clothes or into our tools in
the real world we also project ourselves into our avatars. They are
very much are us.

Ron
Millar
(Chief Creative Officer at VR Chat): Custom avatars are
hugely important for social VR. People like to identify people and
like to be identified. People want to be what they want to be. [They]
like to express themselves and I think virtual reality allows you to
express yourself in ways we never had before and the more customizing
you can do the better.

Rosedale:
The Big thing that people want, I think, in VR is other people
and creativity. More than anything people want to basically get past
all this new hardware and get to the real thing that we all want to
do which is to make and be together.

Oh:
You'll be having these second characters that are populating your
existing environment that can actually not only give you information
but also they can be your friends and I think that's going to be
really important for the future of how digital avatars are
represented in augmented reality.

Bailenson:
What VR offers is even if you can't solve this really really hard
problem, which is artificial intelligence, you can create these
scenes and scenarios and avatars and agents that actually inspire
emotional responses. So you can't solve AI but you can create scenes
and interactions that make the brain feel real.

Millar:
We discovered through a community that there's not a style. If
you were to join VR Chat and you happen in anime or you happen to be
into robots are you happen to be into cartoon characters, why should
really restrict you from being that in the meta-verse?

Oh:
This new future we're being able to augment who we are as
individuals. Where we can really enhance ourselves with these
technological superpowers.

?:
Translation of identity into VR is amazing. No one's ever understood
it. We still don't understand. It's still unfolding as a story.

Rosedale:
One of the things I'm fascinated about with Morph is that here
we've got a team products diving right in the middle of this biggest
question which is how are we going to use these VR interfaces and
these VR devices to actually make our own identity. I think it's one
of the most important discovery problems that we face in building VR
as an ecosystem.

Millar:
That's where we're headed because not everyone's an artist and I
think there's got to be different ways that allow you to take a
character, edit how you want, some things on the fly, in the actual
system itself.

Oh: I really do believe that augmented
reality can get us closer to who we are as individuals and who we are
and what it means to have identity.

Rosedale:
You know, I jump out of bed every morning to keep working on
building something that I think in the end will be, in some strange
amazing way is kind of bigger than anything we as humans have ever
done.

Bailenson:
If we can make an avatar feel like this, we've completely changed
the landscape of how we think about work, living, and play.